One issue with trying to beat the shorts if you think a company is being 'looted' is that exactly what you saw play out with AMC and Gamestop can happen: they can create more shares and thus dilute the value of each share and increase the liquidity for short sellers who are trapped to get out. Also, there's no shot that you are allowed 100x leverage by any institutions when playing with stocks, that's closer to forex. Imagine that in practicality: if the stock went up 1% on you when shorting, you'd be smoked. Banks might be crooked, but they also don't want to hemorrhage money for no reason. I don't know exactly what the derivatives numbers included, but a massive chunk of the derivatives market is options, which are dynamically hedged by banks, meaning that they have very little exposure to the movement of the stock. Basically, you'd have to give an actual breakdown of what those derivatives are and how much (or little) collateral is posted for those numbers to mean anything. On a final point, if you believe them, which I'm ambivalent about, the SEC released a report going over how the hedge funds actually got out fairly early in the GME squeeze and that it was mostly a gamma hype movement. There's some logic to this, as his last point about how much money they'd lose if they held it from $2 to $60 is accurate, which is why banks or brokerages they were working with would want to force them to close it out, because otherwise they could get saddled with that massive debt. All in all, there's some elements here that make sense, but this overall thesis that GME will collapse the global financial system smells a whole lot like an attempt to get people to yolo in and/or a rationalization to cling to a trade that has been slowly dying for years.